Halo Infinite’s engine is built to treat PC “as a full first-class citizen”

Halo Infinite was announced for PC alongside the console version back at E3. It won’t be the first Halo game to come to computers, but it’s the first to be announced and, presumably, developed from the ground up right beside the Xbox edition. 343 Industries is still cagey on providing many details about the game, but a new developer stream offers a bit of insight on what to expect.

The new Slipstream engine has been developed with PC in mind, including the ability to fully customise and scale with different hardware configurations – an advantage 343 says is much more easily afforded with the knowledge from the start that this version is going to Windows. The line on stream was “We take the PC as a full first-class citizen. The PC audience expects different things than a more curated console experience. It definitely goes into our philosophy of making sure we can allow scalability of things on the different hardware of the PC.”

You can hear the quote for yourself on the Mixer archive at 1:02:33. That specific “first-class citizen” phrase has been surprisingly common in Microsoft’s attempts to address PC as a gaming platform over the past couple of years, going back to the promotion of Age of Empires: Definitive Edition and Gears of War 4. Both those games ended up as excellent PC releases – though admittedly marred by the limitations of the Windows Store.

There were some other notable details on the stream – as noted by ResetEra – but we’re still far from a blowout on Halo Infinite information. Customisation options for your multiplayer Spartan will be similar to Reach, and you can expect four player splitscreen to be included, though we don’t know for which modes. Addressing a particular controversy in the community, Spartans will have black undersuits.

The Halo Infinite release date is a long way off, and that shouldn’t be a surprise given how little we saw at E3. When it does come around, at least we can expect the PC version to be right there with the game on Xbox.